The New Pictures

The Story on Page One (20th Century-Fox): WIFE AND LOVER HELD IN HUSBAND SLAYING. The husband (Alfred Ryder) is a detective on the police force of a big city in California. His wife (Rita Hayworth) falls in love with a young widower (Gig Young) who visits her one night in her kitchen. The husband catches them, pulls a pistol, is shot dead in the scuffle. Charged with murder, the pair are defended by two attorneys--he by a boozy old bungler, she by a fast-talking, hard-sweating young attorney (Anthony Franciosa) who seems to be terribly afraid that he will not get his client out of the clink and into the clinch. The poor boy does not seem to understand, as audiences readily will, that the lovers are not really being tried for murder but for adultery, that the jury is not on the screen but in front of it, and that the camera is fighting for the lovers just as hard as he is.

To begin with, the defendants are presented as decent, hardworking, responsible people who want nothing more out of life than a little personal happiness. The husband, on the other hand, is a foulmouthed, beer-bellied, wife-belting brute. The heroine's honor is smirched "just once," and this not so much for her own pleasure as to comfort the man she loves, who has been shattered by the death of his young son. What's more, the poor hero has been hounded all his life by a monster of a mother (Mildred Dunnock) who intends to keep her son if she has to kill him to do it (she hires the incompetent lawyer so she can run the defense as she sees fit). On top of everything else, the state's attorney (Sanford Meisner) proves to be the sort of leering, sneering villain who turns prosecution into persecution.

Actress Hayworth, the onetime pinup girl, has now mastered the role of the beat-down broad, and when she is on-camera, she holds the show in shape. When she is not, the suspense dissolves into a mess of sentimental pablum--hardly the dish a customer expects from Playwright Clifford (Waiting for Lefty] Odets. Scriptwriter Odets here takes his first crack in 15 years at directing a picture, and perhaps should be forgiven some errors of inexperience. But seasoned Producer Jerry Wald might have done something about Actor Franciosa, an almost comically intense young man who reads every line as though it were his last. No such luck.

Never So Few (Canterbury Productions; M-G-M), based on the 1957 bestseller (about 500,000 copies) by Tom T. Chamales, is a war picture that helpfully explains to those who were not there what the war in Burma was really like.

It was hell, see. Just a handful of G.I.s and some fawning Burmese out there in the Kachin hills, and a Japanese peeping from behind every other orchid. Fortunately, the enemy looked like monkeys and were awfully dumb. U.S. Army Captain Frank Sinatra was running the show, a Tommy gun in one hand and a bottle in the other. What a man. They called him "the Abe Lincoln of North Burma." Back in Calcutta on leave, Frankie met Gina Lollobrigida, who decided he was the biggest thing to hit those parts since Errol Flynn. "Say," said Frank, "you're put together like a Christmas package.'' Gina played hard to get, but Frank got her. In fact, he got her so often it's a wonder the enemy didn't get them both.

Frank got back to the jungle in time to fight a couple of spectacularly unconvincing battles, but pretty soon he was off to Allied headquarters, where he fought such a long-drawn-out legal engagement with Chiang Kai-shek and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that anybody who sees this picture may be forgiven a profound sigh of assent when one actor remarks: "You know, this war seems to go on forever."

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